Adept Play
System refers to any and all interactions which result in play, as a dynamic and changing form of fiction. These posts address its features at any scale or purpose of play.
Ron’s Numeracy course puts an important focus on the fact that: RPG is about bounce, which means that the collective reincorporation of fictional elements provided by each person of the table creates fictional content that no single one of those people anticipated. Bounce starts with the intersection of the four authorities. Stochastic procedures only reinforce…
We finished our game of the Pool set in an alternate magical/fantasy Napoleonic era India/Afghanistan. We played 18 sessions. The final confrontation saw Brigadier General Jean-Jacqyes d’Espoir defy his superior (Lord Lumley, Albion’s Governor General of their Mountain Kingdom colony; also the husband of Espoir’s unrequited love interest) and attack Shah Durani, a diabolist and…
A lot of interviews showed up recently. For this one, I was contacted by Nune, who is studying entrepeneurship in Rotterdam. (rhymes with “rune,” one syllable) His questions included what does it mean to be a role-playing publisher, what do you have to contend with, what should you consider, and especially, the term he used,…
In last night's CORE session, three reality-sliders tumbled through four scenarios:– Resurrect Frankenstein's Monster & teach him love– Camel race to save the baby Jesus– National dance competition vs Evil– Car chase thru 1972 farmers market to deliver Pulsing Tesseract to The Spindle All these settings were mere justifications for me to playtest a few…
The explanation for this image is wonderfully apparent in the second session. Tod requested consulting specifically about late-stage design, bordering on presentation and writing, concerning how to GM, which in turn includes how to present and teach the game. As people reading this probably know, this is my cue to do exactly what the client…
Over the last few weeks, Jon, Sean and I have been playing a game of the Pool in a fantasy setting initially slapped together using a single picture as inspiration (I think this is one of Ron's techniques, and I played in a game that Ross started this way years ago). This week's intended game…
… “the pedagogy of folk tales,” or at least, of playing them. Johann’s game in design, Im Reich der Nibelungen (“in the realm of the Nibelungs”) draws on Germanic folk literature, including twisted forests, lost children, laws of magic, and monsters you can talk to. Its procedures begin with a smoothish hack of older forms…
I've been playing / running a fair amount of D&D 5e oneshots at the local games cafe recently (the owner says they often get RPG curious people asking about D&D and has persuaded some of the regular RPG evening attendees to run it more often). As a result of this I have been thinking about…